October 20, 2021

Presenting digestible information to your board is important. A good pitch can be the difference between getting buy-in for a new project or losing support. So where should you begin when preparing for your next meeting? Here are a few tips to get you started.

Preparing pitches to your board – how to share your talking points in a digestible manner.

Before you begin:

  • Determine what questions you want answered. This will determine the data you will collect.
  • Know your audience. How much information are they already aware of and who is in the audience? If your audience is media relations, journalists and the press, you want to stick to five strong indicators and get ahead of questions. With your stakeholders you can include more research and go over data points quicker because your audience is more familiar with what you are presenting.

1.When developing the presentation – set the stage.

  • Give your data a story
  • Set the context of the current situation to show comparisons with your findings
  • What data is relevant to your board? What are your metrics? Highlight these and then provide interesting or surprising results at the end.
  • Go over the methodology but stick to bullet points and high-level information. Going too deep into methodology can sometimes only lead to more questions.

2.Dissect factors that lead to your conclusions.

  • YOU know your board. How will they react to what you are showing them?  Prepare to answer their questions by answering them while presenting.
  • Lay out your findings in 3-5 bullet points. Put the summary of findings front and center, so they are easily discovered.

3.End with looking ahead – cover the game changers that affect your forecast.

  • Example: “We are looking forward to a good travel season but factors that could change this are: gas prices, traveler sentiment, etc.”
  • Go over any positive or negative exponentials that you foresee. This will help set the stage for your next meeting.

Other tips:

Infographics are popular but can be difficult to understand. Stick to basic charts. They are easy to understand by everyone.

Any research/data that you already have, make sure they continually see you using it. If you ask for more research, they will ask what you are doing with data already acquired. Always point to your data when decision making is happening.